The Towers of Trebizond (22 page)

Anyhow love lit up Andoch for us like fairy lamps, and it was awful when it was time for us to return to Iskenderon because the Argo was off to Cyprus. We drove in to Iskenderon an hour before it sailed, and said good-bye on the quay where the launch went from. After it had gone, and was dashing away for the Argo in a splurge of foam, I went off to the camel stables and found that the driver had brought in my camel from Kayseri, and it seemed well and fresh, and I decided to start for Aleppo and Syria next day, when I had got my Syrian visa, which I had forgotten to do in London.

That evening David and I dined together at the Mediterranean Palace. He was much easier in his mind now that he had Charles's manuscript, but still had a few anxieties and was a little self-conscious. He asked me how my book was getting on, now that I was doing it alone. I said it was not getting on, and I had never really meant to write a book alone, only to contribute bits, and of course pictures, to aunt Dot's. Then he said what about contributing pictures and bits to his instead, and I could see that he missed Charles, and would like to have me involved in this book, partly to keep me quiet about it. But I said I was still expecting aunt Dot back from Russia, and must keep any contributions I wrote for her book, and I could see that David thought that this was unfortunate, my being still involved in a rival book. He said, "Oh well, let it go," and offered to cash a small cheque for me if I still wanted money. But I told him I could get on all right now, and he saw that I was drifting away from him and that all he could do was to trust in God.

Next morning I went to the Syrian Consulate, which was open every day between 11.30 and 12, and filled in the visa form. The consul looked at what I had written, and at my passport, suspiciously, as if he did not care for either.

He said, "Have you ever been in Israel?"

I said, "
Israel
? Good gracious no. Why on earth should I want to go
there,
of all places?"

"It is," he said, "I who am asking the questions. Have you been to Israel?"

"I've told you once. No."

He looked through my passport, turning the pages with covetous inquisitiveness, as if he suspected them of obscenity.

"Profession," he then said, very loudly and angrily. "Why have you not written it here? You have written 'Independent.' "

"Yes. I couldn't think what else to put."

"
Independent
, you have written."

"Yes," I agreed. The conversation seemed rather repetitive.

"You know what means
independent
?
"

"Yes, I think I do. It means no one pays me regularly for working."

"Independent," he said, turning the word over on his tongue in some disgust. "That means spy."

"No," I said. "Not in English. Spies aren't independent, they get wages."

"You are not here in England." He sounded as angry as people usually do when they make this remark. "In the East, independent is spy. I do not give you visa."

Too proud to plead, I rose to go.

"Just as you please. No doubt I can get one elsewhere."

"You cannot get a visa anywhere, for you do not get your passport back. I keep it."

"No. I keep it. It is mine."

"I keep it," he said, and threw it into a drawer, which seemed full to the brim of purloined passports.

As he seemed to be in the stronger position, I left him, saying coldly, "I go to the British consul."

"You may tell him that I keep your passport, since you are a spy, and spoke insolently to me, and wish to visit Israel."

I went to the British Consulate. The consul said, "It is quite difficult to get out of the Syrian Consulate with your passport. The consul likes to collect them. I will ring him up, and you will hear. Get me the Syrian Consulate."

Someone got him this. The conversation they had seemed more or less one-sided. Presently the consul hung up, and said, "He says you can't have it at present, he must make some enquiries about you. Have you a second passport?"

"Yes."

"Endorsed merely Israel, no doubt.
That
won't get you far, unless you fly direct there, and then you won't get out of it except into the sea."

"No," I said, "I won't fly," and I felt rather grand that he should think I had as much money as that. "Actually, I am on a camel."

"Then you'll have to stay here till the Syrian consul has finished his enquiries. You may get your passport back. I will do what I can, but he is an obstinate man
 
.
 
.
 
.
 
Are
you a spy, by the way?"

"Unfortunately, no."

"And are you independent?"

"Just now, unfortunately, yes."

"Well, that seems about all we can do for you. Look in another day and have a chat. Good morning."

I went out.

I spent three days in Iskenderon, and got to know it pretty well. It was very hot and humid; in the mornings and evenings there was a mist, but all day it was bright and clear, and the sunsets were red as if a great smoky fire burned over the sea to the west. The horse-shoe bay curved round, decorated with palm trees all along the front, and battleships lay in the bay, lit up all night. The bright little streets looked rather French, and there was still some French spoken in the shops. No one stared at foreigners, for they had been trained to this strange sight for years. From 9 a.m. on till evening men played games in cafés along the front. Boys bathed on the shore, and I walked a mile up the coast and bathed too. I got to know an agent of Shell Company and his wife, who were very kind to me. I should not have minded spending some time in Alexandretta, it was so gay and amiable. The girls were friendly and we chatted in French on the front. Dr. Halide had said that the Alexandretta women and girls were bird-witted, and perhaps they are, I don't particularly mind. When they asked me what I did, and whether I was married, I said I was a celibate missionary, which impressed them, so then I told them about the Church of England, of which they had not heard till then, though they knew about Roman Catholics. Dr. Halide said that Moslems would make better Anglicans than they would Roman Catholics. This may be so, but we did not make any, so we cannot know. But we did not talk much about religion in Alexandretta, and the girls were quite western and emancipated, and Atatürk would have liked them.

Every morning I called at the British Consulate for news of my passport, but it seemed the Syrian consul still had it. On the fourth morning, however, I was told that this consul was now ready to give it back to me, and would even grant me a visa, so I supposed that his enquiries had discovered nothing but good about me. When I got there, his affairs must have been going much better, for he did not scowl, but smiled and shook my hand and handed me my passport as if he were giving me a diploma or a cheque, and said he hoped I would enjoy my visit to beautiful Syria. There was Aleppo, he said, and Palmyra, and Baalbek, and Homs and Damascus and Saida, and many magnificent Syrian castles, such as Crac, and he talked on like a tourist leaflet, and quite forgot about how I was an independent spy. So we parted in kindness and pleasure, and I went off and loaded up the camel and we trotted away along the Aleppo road.

As I now had plenty of liras, and was not in a hurry, I enjoyed my weeks of camel travel in the Levant very much. I ambled along, sitting back comfortably on the soft saddle, while the camel tossed its head and its white ostrich plumes waved, and it pawed the ground and sometimes cried "Ha ha" like a war horse, and sometimes it would canter along roaring, either from excitement, pleasure, annoyance or love, and I never discovered which it was. I felt like one of the seventeenth century travellers who trekked across the Levant with so much zest, and that I and the camel were part of the gorgeous pageant of the East. I remembered how Evliya Efendi of Istanbul had written, "Forming a design of travelling over the whole earth, I entreated God to give me health for my body and faith for my soul," though he had also said "according to the tradition of the Prophet, a journey is a fragment of hell," which of course it can also be. But not when one has money for food and drink and a bed, and a camel to ride on, and travels the caravan routes across Syria, and sees Aleppo and Tortosa and Ruad and Byblos and Beyrout and the mountain garden coast of Lebanon, and Baalbek and Palmyra and Sidon and Tyre and Damascus and Amman, and Jerash emerging in Corinthian splendour from its rocky hill, and half a dozen Crusader castles, and deserts and mountains and valleys, and at last, after many weeks, one is in Judaea and Palestine, and this country is where my Murray's Guide, which is a century old, says beware of the inhabitants, who are Bedawins (and they sound dangerous when spelt like that), and behind many a rock, says Murray, you catch sight of the gleam of a matchlock or a tufted spear, and the country can only be traversed safely with an escort of this same type of person, and the Fellahin, who cultivated the soil, were nearly as bad, and all this tends to show that foreign travel is much tamer than once it was. But it is equally hot, and I went down a thousand feet beneath the sea to Jericho as if it was a descent into the fiery pit of hell. It was too hot for any one to be excavating; I went over the Ummayad palace they had been digging up, but this, though it had been a fine palace once, was too hot too, and the Ummayad kings had only used it in winter, and I saw that they were right. As for Canaanite Jericho, that city of palms and balsams and stately buildings whose walls had been too ill-built to stand up to trumpet blasts, and as for the Jericho which Antony gave to Cleopatra, and the Roman Jericho which Herod built up and beautified, I saw little of any of them and thought I had better come back in about twenty years, when the excavators had made more of them, for dug-up bits and pieces had palled on me by now, and I wanted buildings that stood up. So I rode through modern Jericho, which Murray had called a filthy and miserable village, and its few inhabitants both poor and profligate, having retained the vices of Sodom, but modern Jericho now has a smart, respectable appearance, not at all like that, though of course appearances are deceptive, and I hurried through it to the Dead Sea, and soon I found myself seated on this sea, clasping my hands round my knees and swaying to and fro as if I was in a rocking-chair or in the Droitwich baths, and gazing up at the mountains of Moab, while the camel dabbled its paws in the tiny waves that sizzled on the shore. Afterwards I had a Coca-Cola in the little Lido café and bathed in the Jordan to cool myself and wash off the stickiness, and I sluiced the camel, and it drank till it was full of water, and then, in the cool of the evening, I rode on to Jerusalem.

Where aunt Dot stayed in Jerusalem was in St. George's hostel, which was in the cloisters of the Anglican cathedral, so I went straight there and rode into the close and asked for a room. They had one, and they let me tie up the camel in the garden, where it immediately knelt down and went to sleep. I went into the hostel, and the first person I saw in it was my mother, whom I had last seen five years back in the Adriatic, when aunt Dot and I were trying to walk through the sea to Dalmatia, which we had to give up not because the sea was too deep, but because we had not got our passports on us, and my mother passed by in a motor launch with her protector, and stopped to talk to us, and gave us a lift back to the Italian shore. We were always pleased to meet one another, in a calm, unexcited way, and we were pleased now. She and her protector were staying with friends in Jerusalem, and had come to St. George's hostel to dine with Stewart Perowne, and to look at some objects (Corinthian) that he had lately dug up and planted in his little garden. The protector was quite rich, so I was glad to think that my financial worries would be solved.

My mother was (indeed, is) rather large and plump; as she is also handsome, she faintly suggests a buxom goddess, who has perhaps been hatched from a good-sized swan's egg inspired by Zeus. She must have looked very well in the old days as a vicar's wife, carrying her children about in gardening baskets.

She said, "Why, it's Laurie. My dear sweet child. But I thought you were in Turkey. Has there been any news of Dot? The English papers think she and that Father Pigg are busy spying."

She had read about aunt Dot's disappearance in the papers, and had not, she said, been at all surprised, as Dot was always up to something. She herself was a more lethargic type, and, but for the natural energy and activity of her protector, would have been inclined to stay in one place, or drift about the world very slowly. By nature prolific, she had presented me with several half-brothers and sisters, by now good-sized and undergoing education. I told her there had been no news of aunt Dot, but that I had the camel.

"Well, darling," she said, "the sooner you get rid of it the better. They are very treacherous. I hope you are going to settle down here now for some time and have a rest. I can give you money to fly home when you want to go. Or to Cyprus, with Howard and I."

My mother is not common, but she has never been able to grasp grammar, or why it is wrong to talk about flying to Cyprus with I. I remember as a child my father disputing this point with her, but she could never understand, and went on saying it. She did not say "flying with I ", but if any one else was flying too, she thought that this put the first person singular into the nominative case, and that this was a rule of grammar, and not really odder than many other rules, for she had not got a grammatical mind.

I said that, now I was so near it, I thought I had better go across into Israel before going home, as I would like to see the Sea of Galilee and Nazareth and the Palestine coast from Acre down to Askalon. She agreed that this was very beautiful.

"But you must avoid Telaviv; it's a quite dreadful town. And all those little kibbutzes are tiresome." (My mother never liked hard, or indeed any other, work). "You'll enjoy Galilee. The bathing is delicious. And of course all those associations it has. Do you still go to church, darling?"